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100 suns

A machine made of wood, metal, paint, bone and magic

The fiendish hun

So, Germany has offered to help the UK with their contact-tracing app An app which is deployed, whose source code is publicly available, with all the commit messages being in English and with at least some English internationalization already complete (and, I think, all of it). The British, of course, spent £11 million on an app that they basically knew could never work. And of course they will now refuse Germany's help because it's not British, and only British is good. Better Dead than NOT...
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Doing nothing

If you think we are doing something about climate change, you're wrong: almost without exception we are doing nothing. One group of people sign agreements which makes everyone feel good and pretend that this is doing something, which it's not. Another group of people pretends that it isn't happening or that, if it is happening it is someone else's fault, and this is not doing anything either, but is worse in other ways (see below). There are a minute number of people who might actually make a...
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So, OK

In case you had any doubt about whether Trump was a racist, he's just made it very clear: of course he is. I've said this before: Trump is a racist, and supporting racists is racism. That means that the people who support Trump are racists. The whole claim that somehow they are good people who don't understand who they're voting for is insulting their intelligence: no, they're not too stupid to understand that Trump is a racist, rather they voted for him because they understand and support wh...
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It's always both

So, Donald Trump is doing so well at dealing with CV19: so far more than 125,000 people have died, and the true number will be significantly above that both because they won't be counting properly and also because they'll be busy suppressing the information. But, but: the mortality rate is about 2.3 times higher for Black Americans than for other groups1. If you're a racist who does not care about taking a few casualties along the way that's very convenient, isn't it? One comforting thing ab...
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Sunlit uplands

Because of course Boris Johnson was stealing a phrase from Churchill, because of course brexit is like the battle of Britain. Or, at least, pretending it is lets us all wallow in nostalgia for a time only a tiny minority of us can remember. Except this time, the nazis are on the other side. Perhaps that should be a clue: if you find yourself on the side of the nazis you are on the wrong side. ...
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The end of history

Famously, history has not ended. Except it is ending: you don't get to have exponential processes with a physical component which run for ever without hitting various walls. Humans have run several such processes for hundreds of years and we're now hitting the walls. If we don't do anything about it then the walls will kill most of us: there's going to be an awful lot of history for a century or so and then none at all for a very long time. And, of course, rather than solving the fucking pro...
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Not Mars

If you assume that sending a person to live on Mars requires about as much fuel as sending three people to stay the Moon for a day or so did, then each person we send to live on Mars requires about 770 cubic metres of RP-11. Burning this fuel produces about 1.9 million kg of CO2. If we assume that the production and other costs associated with a launch double this2 then each person we send to live on Mars results in about 3.8 million kg of CO2 being emitted. This is entirely negligible if we ...
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Torque and energy

I've always been confused about why the units of torque, which are force × distance (in SI base units N×m) are the same as those for work: why, in SI units, is torque measured in joules? But it's obvious, because torque really is work: if you turn something through 1 radian exerting a torque of 1Nm, then you do 1J of work on whatever it is you are turning. The units of torque are really joules per radian, but radians, of course, are dimensionless. I don't know why it took me so long to unders...
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Narcissist

If you are a narcissist and someone offers you help, you assume it's because you are so wonderful, not because they have something to gain by it. This makes narcissists very vulnerable to political influence operations: they genuinely do not realise what is going on because their understanding of what motivates people is so badly damaged. ...
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A machine for manufacturing the future

CERN wants to build a new collider, and inevitably people will say that we should use the money for something more useful. There is nothing more useful than what CERN does. If we're going to have a long-term future as a civilisation ('long-term' being more than a human lifetime ahead), we need two critical bits of technology (we need others, but we need these two). The first is really good batteries. Well, you carry around with you a machine which pretends to be a communication device but is ...
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Aid

So, for a long time, the UK has at least tried to give aid to people who need it: people who were starving, for instance. Now we're going to be giving it to people who will help our foreign policy objectives. People in eastern Europe who are not starving, but who might help us fight the pesky Russians. So the people who we could have saved will now die. So Dominic Cummings has killed some more people: how many thousands of deaths is he responsible for now? ...
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Not long ago

One of my grandparents was born in 1887. He died just before I was born. If he had been American and black (he was not either) there's a good chance his parents would have been born as slaves. If he'd lived a little longer as well I would have known someone whose parents were born as slaves. Certainly people alive today knew people whose parents were born as slaves. This is not ancient history. ...
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Contact tracing

So the UK is finally going to switch to the Apple-Google model for its contact-tracing app. Although they didn't tell Apple this: even though Downing Street1 said the government had worked closely with Apple and Google Apple commented it is difficult to understand what these claims are as they haven't spoken to us. Matt Hancock2 also said we've agreed to join forces with Google and Apple, to bring the best bits of both systems together to which Apple commented we don't know what ...
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Götterdämmerung

I've just been looking at my copy of Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. There is a spooky footnote in the introduction which must have been added late in the publication process, saying As of April 1973, there are significant indications that Cygnus X-1 and other compact x-ray sources may be black holes. When they wrote the book there were no known black holes, and I don't think everyone even thought they were physically plausible. I bought it in 1985, Hawking conceded his bet that Cygnus X-1 was...
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Competence (2013)

This now seems alarmingly prescient. I think this is more evidence for what is probably the NSA's biggest problem: competence. We already know that they were not competent to prevent a fairly junior person having access to an enormous amount of sensitive data, and walking off with it, which does not say anything good about their internal security practices. Now we know that this person successfully used a really obvious social-engineering attack on other people in the organisation: you don't ...
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Spiral

In the beginning, something happens – a banking crisis perhaps – which makes a lot of people poorer. So, well you could fix the problem – by regulating the financial system properly for instance – and accept that some of it was because of your own stupidity and greed – the housing market isn't a machine out of which money pours for ever, it turns out. But understanding that require some basic numeracy, and no-one really wants to take the blame for their own misfortune anyway: it's always easie...
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Extreme

The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good – because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn't it? – John Cleese, apparently, but probably just reading a script ...
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COBR

There hasn't been a COBR meeting since the 10th of May. After all, it's not like we're living through an emergency or anything, is it? And those awkward people disagreeing with the plans laid down by the mighty Cummings: we can't have them, can we. Jolly good, what? ...
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Statuary

I don't know what to think about this. Obviously a lot of statues commemorate horrible people, and those statues should not be there1: no-one needs statues of people whose importance is that they got rich from the slave trade. The people defending such statues are either racists, stupid, or both2. But what about Churchill? Clearly he had some views which are repugnant. But so did almost everyone: I was alive in the 1970s and even then many, many people had really repugnant views (probably i...
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Moral theatre

Moral theatre doing or saying something which has no good consequence and quite possibly a harmful one but which appears to have a good consequence on casual inspection. Generally done to impress people with the virtue and purity of the person performing the act, often also because the act, although meaningless, 'feels good'. See also virtue semaphore, security cinema. – First Encyclopedia of Tlön, 23rd edition, 2049 ...
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Global

In 1990, about 1.9 billion people were living in extreme poverty. In 2015 about 730 million were1. The number of people living in absolute poverty has gone down by a factor of about 2.6 in a generation: the number of people living in extreme poverty in 2015 was less than half of that in 1990. But that's not really the right number: in 1990 the world's population was about 5.3 billion people: about one person in 2.8 was living in extreme poverty in 1990. In 2015 the world's population was abo...
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The conservative party

has changed beyond recognition they say: once it was a party of, well, conservatives – people who would prefer that things stay the same if possible – who had no time for people who whine or people who regarded themselves as victims; today it is a party of whining self-declared victims who want to tear everything apart. Except not so much has changed, has it? The conservative party has always been known as 'the stupid party'. It still is. ...
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Priti Patel: the gift that keeps on giving

So, Priti Patel again: I have already said repeatedly there is no place for racism in our country or in society. So why are you pushing legislation which targets Roma? Because there's a name for that, and that name is 'racism'. Just because you aren't white, and just because you were the target of racism, does not mean you aren't a racist. If you do things or say things which are racist, or support people who do or say such things, then you're a racist. And, Priti Patel, the things you d...
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Priti Patel

So Priti Patel thinks that the removal of a statue commemorating a slave trader is 'utterly disgraceful'. Of course she does. After all, it's important to commemorate slave traders, isn't it? Let's just remember that Priti Patel is also the person who wants to make being a gypsy illegal: an act which would be explicit ethnic cleansing. I'm half-surprised she'd not campaigning to bring slavery back. Perhaps she is. She's really a piece of work: a bully, a liar, a bigot and, if that wasn't e...
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Protest

Protests about the brutal way the police treat black people are pretty obviously going to make CV19 worse: saying they won't is just implausible. But on the other hand, saying 'the police can kill people and you are not allowed to protest because CV19' is clearly opening the way for some very nasty behaviour indeed. 'How convenient that there is an epidemic,' the authoritarian thinks, 'now we can say that people are not allowed to protest while we round up people we don't like and ship them of...
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'Our position is these officers were simply following orders'

Exhibit 1: Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square [...]. – John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association Exhibit 2: There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders [...] I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty. – Adolf Eichmann, Nazi ...
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Zoom

Corporate clients will get access to Zoom’s end-to-end encryption service now being developed, but Yuan said free users won’t enjoy that level of privacy, which makes it impossible for third parties to decipher communications. 'Free users for sure we don’t want to give that because we also want to work together with FBI, with local law enforcement in case some people use Zoom for a bad purpose'. – Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, 2nd June 2020 So that's just fine, then. ...
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James Mattis

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past g...
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Delete your Facebook account

Don't read this, just delete your Facebook account. Violet Blue: New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose spotted that the "top 10 stories on Facebook over the past 24 hours" were all from Fox News, "Blue Lives Matter," and similar sources. Meaning: the slant of all stories in FB's "top 10" (surfaced to the masses) were pro-police and Trump's agenda. Roose documented that FB's daily specials were "about Trump declaring antifa a terrorist group," he wrote. "One is a feel-good story about a t...
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And you will know him by the trail of dead

I'm interested in how many people will die because of what Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson have done: Cummings by treating the lockdown rules as something that apply to other, lesser people, and Johnson by demonstrating that doing that is just fine. The result will be that people take lockdown and social distancing less seriously, and some of them die as a result. So I wrote an epidemic simulator. It's fairly simple-minded, but it does the susceptible / infected / immune-or-dead thing. An...
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